Thursday, March 06, 2008

Why Is Farrakhan Scarier Than Hagee? Look At Their Photos

Kevin Drum speculates as to why the reciprocal embrace of John McCain by hateful, crazy evangelical minister John Hagee--"a white Farrakhan"--has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, while Obama continues to get raked over the coals despite having disavowed Farrakhan's endorsement:
It's funny, but in a way I think this is a demonstration of the condescending attitude that a lot of urban reporters have toward evangelicals. Call it the soft bigotry of low expectations. Basically, they figure that these guys are all lunatic nutballs with weird beliefs, and they're so used to this idea that they give it a pass when it pops into the news. It's just Uncle Bob. You know how he gets. If they actually took evangelicals seriously, instead of treating them like members of long-lost Amazon tribes, they'd pay more attention to stories like this and they wouldn't give McCain a free pass on Hagee's endorsement.
This may be partly right, but I suspect that good old-fashioned racism is a bigger factor. America's mostly-white reporters and pundits, and their mostly-white audiences, are afraid of the Black Muslims because they believe that the Muslims hate them and would kill them in their sleep if they got a chance. Whereas they assume that extreme Christian fundamentalists, while stupid, are not threatening to them.

It's the same logic by which the media, back in the 1960s and 70s, convinced themselves (and much of the citizenry) that Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown were more dangerous than the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Brotherhood.

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